Times are indeed getting tougher and likely to lead to a changed world in many ways.

Who will you become?

How will you get there?

Some plain and fancy thinking can help unlock the value inherent in your employees’ knowledge and the value proposition you create for your customers’ changing needs and wants.

You also need a conceptual tool kit to understand and interpret what your respondents are telling you.

Top-down communications are no longer are enough.

You’ll need to engage, listen. dialogue and synthesize with a number of target groups.

Living systems - plain and fancy - with a fishy client story to illustrate.

As always - You are invited to comment; in podcast, video or text. I promise not to slit my throat if you don’t like me.

When everything is unknown, your values can become power fields.

This is why I’m always stressing the importance of understanding.

Understanding let’s you generate truths about the system and apply the model to working positive changes in an uncertain world.

Recruiting, Retention and Employee Engagement

Strategic HR people know that it’s a waste to pretend toward a recruiting strategy without a retention strategy … and that both are driven by the fundamental character of the organization and it’s leaders.

This becomes a problem because of change: changing attitudes of young workers, globalization and competition, aging work force with changing work/life demands; volatile economies, etc.

Strategic HR has now become, in many ways, social marketing, branding the organization as an Employer of Choice. This involves a view of HR marketing as engaging a person and valuing the buy-in decision for an employee’s engagement.

All purchase is risk. Just as the hiring decision entails risk, buying-in to a job is a risky commitment. To minimize risk, perfect relationships involve matching expectations and commitments – do your commitments to me match my expectations of you; do your expectations match my commitments. Managing the relationship involves attending to this getting-giving compact continually.

One change I’ve seen in my work: it was common to see one-way top-down client communications: inform, educate, persuade and reassure; now sophisticated clients understand effective leadership involves practice intended to: engage, listen, dialogue and synthesize.

Focus group research with your people allows you to develop an integrated picture of your staff, their commitment, their engagement. Focus groups use depth interviewing to probe the meanings and motivations that shape the attitudes and behaviors that drive your organization. The group process helps bring out and articulate conflict and consensus. The objective, independent interviewer has no bias to bring to these proceedings, creating a safe place to bring up trust issues and other potentially dangerous matters.

Focus groups are about the stories that make up your collective working life. Stories matter.

My job is to build on your strength so that your story matters most.

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What’s wrong with healthcare today?

We hear this relentlessly as if it’s proven that our healthcare system is in catastrophic collapse.

What’s wrong with this view?

It assumes only one side matters: it views healthcare solely as an allocation problem.

Well … demands on public resources always outstrip supply … and allocation debates are what politics is all about.

No matter what your position on the ideology, politics or policies of healthcare, the simple fact, it seems to me, is that we are getting better healthcare than critics claim.

In the last year, I’ve done several sets of focus groups with front-line healthcare workers from acute, community, and mental health, including nursing and non-nursing care and support staff.

Front-line people provide the service.

It is unspoken but front-line people are increasingly expected to function as self-directing professionals in a self-regulating environment. And mostly, they do. They are dedicated and committed to contribution to positive patient outcomes, But the stresses are showing; constantly being asked to do more with less, often with little recognition or support, often unsupervised and frequently barely managed.

If you are a manager in healthcare, there are consequences. Productivity of your front-line people is critical.

That means building on their strengths.

That means listening to and understanding your people.

It’s up to you … but I can help.

The first message you give to your people by doing focus groups with them is that you care, and you are listening.

Complaints

The first source of complaints about focus groups is invariably the consequence of not doing them well, properly or professionally; for example, sloppy recruiting leading to a biased group; a moderator alienating his respondents with an arrogant psuedo-scientist attitude that evokes the responses people think he wants to hear … I could go on. Always the fault in these complaints is with the execution and not the method. All fair enough criticisms and all to be guarded against; but instructive only about doing the job properly.

Manipulation

Another criticism of focus groups is that they are manipulative usually for purposes of political spin. First, the spin comes from the politicians and their spin-masters; not the groups - in fact, you don’t even need groups to do spin. Secondly, though, what’s wrong with trying to formulate your best case in language that people find persuasive?

Category Error

Another set of complaints derive from a category error. These are typically complaints that qualitative research is not reliable, not projectible, not valid.

This amounts to a complaint that a Ferrari is not a truck.

This is a complaint that focus groups don’t do the same things as survey research questionnaires do. It’s not really a complaint then - it’s a claim: not grounded, not warranted, without any backing.

The category error is that focus groups are not of the class of things that do quantitative measuring. Quantitative is not of the class of things that can confer legitimacy on focus groups. They exist in different realms. Claim dismissed!

The Case of Conventional Responses

One complaint is that focus groups only get “conventional” responses. There is some confusion about this in that some people think this is inherent in the group process, which I don’t think it is. Focus groups often do evoke conventional superficial responses but I argue that is a result of a conventional moderator eliciting conventional responses.

One taxonomy of “reason-giving” includes: conventions or social formulae, stories or common sense narratives, codes or legal formulae, technical accounts or specialized stories. [Tilly quoted on Gladwell.com]

Early in my untrained self-learned career as a moderator, I quickly discovered that the best way to elicit the best responses was to be a real person and to give of myself early in the group so that I was not a scientist experimenting on respondents but a fellow human being on a credible search for understanding.

If I don’t act as if I want conventional responses but I am more interested in the complex and more deeply held meanings and motivations then I seldom get just conventional responses. And if we get them, another member of the group is as likely to challenge them as me.

In the Case of Brands

Jason Oke, with Leo Burnett, a Toronto ad agency (as quoted on Gladwell’s blog) takes us from the conventional to the importance of stories via a trip through brands.

“How we feel about a brand, and which products and services we choose, is usually explained by a fantastically complex set of factors: the brands our parents used, the brands we see people around us use, the image of the brand, our personal experience with it, a sale, a half-remembered ad from 10 years ago, and so on. This is probably best explained as a story - we may both buy Tide, but there’s a different narrative that brought each of us to pick it up. But in market research, the answers people give sound more like conventions: ‘It’s a good value’, ‘my family likes it’, ‘it tastes good.’ And it seems because of the artificiality of the situation, the perils of introspection, etc. most market research actually encourages people to answer in conventions, and doesn’t encourage the telling of stories. Many of these stories are probably complex and deeply buried such that they are hard to consciously access anyway.”

My view of moderating is that indeed much market research is superficial but there is a reason focus groups are called “depth research” and that is because it’s my job as a moderator to access the complex and deeply buried stories that are hard to consciously access.

Stories matter and the best story wins

But are stories the final word? Here is how the universe of meaning seems to me (having been a reader of Jurgen Habermas):

There are at least three ways of knowing:

[1] an empirical world of facts and things, knowable by science, technology and provable mathematically; that represent themselves as objective realities.

[2] a communicative way of knowing; social knowledge; the social construction of reality - it means what I can persuade you it means; it means what we agree it means; or, as McLuhan says, “Art is what you can get away with.” We can - you should note - agree to be wrong, stupid or uncivilized. It may be a common sense plain thinking but it needs tempering.

[3] a critical way of knowing involving very fancy thinking; spotting and questioning our assumptions, illusions, delusions, contradictions and lies; and liberating us from them to something, at least provisionally, recognized to be true.

So we understand that it is not enough just to record the stories and report. Not only is interpretation involved - but there is also critique. Are these representations clear, coherent and compelling in our client’s case? The job is not to just analyze peoples’ stories but to also synthesize a new story of client possibility.

Making Your Case - Evidence and Practical Reasoning

In marketing research, we are in the business of making claims like:- most people will vote for candidate A because … you should do option B for a spokesperson because … your image is suffering because …

As a matter of practical reasoning: we make claims - based on some grounds - which are warranted- given the backing.

In quantitative survey research, our findings are not facts; they are claims; grounded in the data; warranted by professional interviewing of a representative, proportional, random sample; backed by the scientific method and the laws of mathematical probability. Our claim in survey research is — THIS IS PROBABLY PRETTY CLOSE TO THE ANSWER YOU WANT.

In focus group research, our findings are claims; grounded by the testimony of (market) participants, warranted by the ideas and concepts we use to create pattern perception; backed by the character of living/open/meaning systems. Our claim in focus group research is - THIS IS PRETTY MUCH WHAT IT MEANS TO YOU.

When I first started as a moderator 30 years ago, it was commonly said that focus groups were not really legitimate but they were useful. So they were used. Certainly a claim for pragmatism.

And that’s a fact.

But the fact is - we shouldn’t be looking for facts; we should be looking through the facts for evidence.

Testimony

Focus groups, in effect, take the testimony of those who are engaged in the act. I take their testimony and assemble the evidence, synthesizing it into a story; then I give my report as my testimony from an expert witness.

The point to understanding practical reasoning is to make our procedures evidence-based; that is what gives us judgmental confidence in making the case - your case for tomorrow.

CATEGORY — UNDERSTANDING PEOPLE

Understanding People

My Story

I am engaged in my life-plan. I work hard at it

As I experience my world of spontaneous activity, I am connected by my senses, my orientations, my thoughts, my actions, my intentions.

I encounter a world of means and ends, of hindrances or aids, a web of complexes of interests, complexes of problems, systems of projects and feasibilities inherent in the systems of projects … experienced by me as my plans for the hour or the day.

If you understand my meaning system, you understand me: where I’ve been, where I am, where I could go with you.

As much as survey research is about probabilities; focus groups are about possibilities.

Because life is experienced as time-driven with a past, a now and a future, my meaning system is experienced as the narrative of my life which has yet to be concluded as my story, one for which I yet have some hopes and dreams, intentions and plans.

My story is embodied in my presentations of self in everyday life and I experience my life as a drama in a universe of theatre; complete with heroes and villains; acts one-two-and-three; props, sets, costumes, and staging; endings happy or not; frogs or princes; with audiences large or small. Who knows? Yet.

That’s my story. And I’m sticking to it.

What’s your story?

Deciding who to be

“Objectivity is a useful goal when one is trying to calculate means to ends by predicting the consequences of action, it is of little relevance when deciding what sort of person or nation to be.” Achieving Our Country; Richard Rorty; 1998

Who we are going to be is a choice we have to make together. That’s a leadership issue whether you are in marketing, management or mysticism. Who we are going to be is a choice based on our social knowledge.

Focus groups are centrally concerned with social knowledge.

Social knowledge is a matter of conversation and social practice, rather than an attempt to manifest some objective, extramental truth.

Our lives are intersubjectively disciplined, but personally intentional.

We accept as given the structures of our personal world and our place in it until it becomes, in small or in large ways, problematic.

Then we endeavour to fix it … make it better.

There are levels of satisfaction that tell us when a problem, each to its own, can be considered “solved for now.”

This does not mean that we endlessly lie to ourselves about some truth beyond our grasp; rather that we must tolerate living in a contingent universe. And we must recognize that we do this together.

It is this context which informs our struggle to structure our personal meaning systems as clear, coherent and compelling identities which will endure a lifetime.

Whenever we make choices together, one of the choices is to be together; there’s always a give and take, a transaction, of some kind involved.

Creating ourselves is hard work and we are always at it

Beyond Branding to Identity

Who we are used to be determined from the circumstances of birth. Now it’s a life-style super-decision.

This life-style super-decision has three phases: [1] getting the idea of the new me who I want to become; [2] getting the reality, I.e., buying-in to a job and a residence and buying the basic furnishings and costuming of that life; and [3] engaging my environment with elaborations, embellishments and displays conspicuous or not in maintaining this presentation of self in everyday life.

The things that we buy and buy-in to are purchased, we usually think, because of their use to us. But one of their uses to us is in the assembly of an identity … embodied in things.

My meaning system is a complex web of systems of propositions, claims, facts, practices, presentations, definitions, beliefs, attitudes, aspirations, values, rules of performance, performances, relationships and relationships between relationships that constitute an IDENTITY.

For a brand it’s a question of fit. not just what you mean to mean but what I can make it mean for me; or how I can use you to help create a better story about me. Much of the value of things I possess is what they say about, and for, me.

Buying is selecting the things that will define who we are.

Do your things speak of me?

Do they help me speak of myself?

Then I want them.